If you want my opinion on direction I would go shorter. Looking at your competition, many of their posts are just too long to wade through. I just don’t have the time. I would maintain your high quality but go for shorter snappy content that I can digest and apply in the few minutes I have waiting for the next call or before starting the next design.
http://www.cyberdesignz.com/

First congratulation to your 500th article, only few can claim having accomplished such a thing.

I recognized myself in the actual reader you have been describing. I don’t take the time to read complete and full article other than in actual magazine while I commute. Online, I read small piece of information here and there and I’m more interested in what will come next. You have very interested articles, but I generally save them for later, thinking I will spend some time reading them later on. I saved them as reference, but I don’t consume them as I used to be (2-3 years ago). So in the end I don’t spend allot of time reading the full article and participating in comments. As you have said, time have change and the way we consume our information is now different.

Way(s) to adapt. You said it, all your proposed solutions are not exclusive. After red them all, I concluded that you should try to applied them all: get associated, divided your content as key subjects in niches in small bites of information (blogs) with always a touch of where this information is leading us or may mean in a near future (take example on ReadWriteWeb who generally concluded the majority of his posts/analysis asking the question Will “the subject” is the Future of the Web? and partially answering it).

Time to time, write article/analysis and refer to them in your posts. The best example of a magazine that adapt itself that I may think of is Wired. I follow them as a print magazine and also online in ways that are completely different. For all their niches/subject they have a blog for it and this is what I’m following online and sometime I take the time to read articles they refer to after having read the comments of other users. The community around the blog becomes the stimuli to know more.

The long lasting magazines or business are the ones who never stop exploring other solutions and who has no fear of trying (even if it means loosing a bit of what they were at the beginning). Digital Web Magazine is part of them and I wish long life to it and welcome the changes you are proposing.

you guys have contributed so much to the web. your contributions are felt across the globe. please continue in a refreshing but similar way. your direction is constantly being steered by comments and feedback. your efforts are appreciated and digital-web.com has earned it’s place amongst the more useful URL’s. WELLDONE!!!

Thanks for everyone’s feedback. I think we have a pretty good idea about what the readership thinks we should do now. It’s good to see that the feedback here is in agreement to what the staff is suggesting and what I felt were the best possible solutions.

If your coming to this article late, no worries, post a comment I will keep checking it. For now I just want to let the readers know I will be working with the staff to structure the next steps.

You will probably see another article from me in 2009 about the direction we will take and then shortly after that I am hoping we can do some modifications to the IA I did and the design Jeff did so that it will work with the new approach. Hopefully we’ll have something to show in Spring of 2009 or maybe sooner depending on how fast things go and how much needs to change with the new design.

That is all for now. Feel free to email if you have questions. The staff is on Winter hiatus but I will still be hear reading my email.

I like the current writing style and think that shouldn’t change. I do think adding some future focused articles would be good. It’s good to be aware of this things coming down the pipe, and how we might implement them. I like the breadth of Digital Web articles. The web is a big place with a lot of facets, and i think this publication is a reflection of that.

I have a couple of suggestions. One, is to make each article available in an audio format. That way people can consume it article content more easily while on the go. This will help the readers who are too busy to sit and read the longer articles. Two, there are those of us who have article ideas, and some raw material, but are not strong in writing. So to have a way to donate this material to someone who could synthesize it into an article would be good. Hope that helps.

Just got pointed to this post by a fellow user-experience professional (thanks tamlyn ) as it covers similar ground to what I posted today and it’s a concern that extends not just to music but just about all ‘recommended for you’ style segmented advertising.